The First Draft: An Inner Monologue of Chaotic Thoughts that Precede Writing.
Don’t expect to find an introduction, preface, acknowledgment, foreword, or any other fancy opener to this book. This book is a garbled-up compendium of unorganized thoughts and aspirations that never took off, either due to laziness, procrastination, or the immaculate villain of all ambitious hobos…. Wait, I forgot what I was going to write amidst the intellectual toil for an exceptional combination of adjectives and nouns.
The only reason I am writing right now is because I was bored and couldn’t sleep. It’s ironical: I am a freelance writer and editor, and yet I am too afraid to get my own content published anywhere for several reasons: A) I feel like I am compromising time working on something personal when I can be making money from scouting projects; B) I do not know how, and I don’t want to commit the time to know how for the first reason. Ironical indeed.
And so, I spend my endless days and countless nights wondering what could have been or should be (depending on my tense’s mood). No, I am not mad, at least not in the clinical sense (there might be a few loose screws in the psycho-social dimensions).
Ah, where should I go with this random piece of junkyard art? Maybe someday I’ll publish this chaotic hot piece and it will garner millions of views, or maybe it will spend an eternal vacation in my computer’s recycle bin. Time will tell. Allah knows best.
Until then, write away I will, for it is good practice for my freelance work and it helps organize as well as articulate my volatile thoughts into a decently paced stream of cognizant words. My hope was to start writing and just see if it leads anywhere. (Written after writing the whole thing) the 500-word word count suggests it did.
What is a stopgap and how is it different from a buffer? Mind you, it isn’t relevant to my particular requirements at this moment, but I am too inquisitive by nature to let it go. I’ll look at the definitions several times until they either register in my mind or I subconsciously move on to another literary dilemma. Oxymoronical paradoxes are my specialty — I only say that because the order of those words sounds cool, not because it’s a factual representation of my literary toolkit; yes, I do enjoy oxymorons and word plays, but no, they are not my specialty; just some quirkiness to spice up writing.
I just find myself to be a verbally gifted writer and speaker. I didn’t choose it (as they say, “The thug life chose me.”; no, I don’t know who “they” are, thank you very much, find out after you’re done reading), but now that I find a natural aptitude for these skills (Alhamdulillah), you can be darn sure that I will leverage these skills to make quick bucks, earn a living, and climb the social hierarchies of indolent proletariats who cannot look beyond the first, second, and third meal of the day. Their lives start with breakfast, spurs along with a 9–5, and ends with dinner, only to wake up for a midnight snack, wonder about the cosmos and their uninspiring lives, and go back to sleep after endlessly scrolling through a chasm of gossip-ridden social media feeds and hyper-racist memes that make me question the supposed superior morality of the postmodern man (arrogant pricks, that lot is. Stay humble, God is watching), just to repeat the dreadful cycle again when the jubilant Sun rises up.
This quickly catapulted into a hate piece on average Joe(s) or Josephine(s) (for that blaring feminist who raves about female empowerment; I am talking about you, Karen and Emily). Such was not my intention, for I expressed clearly that I have no intention right now.
Wait, I was supposed to write something interesting, innovative, awe-inspiring, motivational, satirical, fictional non-fiction (see the oxymoron?), self-helpful, psychological, educational, narrative, descriptive, classical, poetic, enthusiastic, expository, repository, archival, dictionarial, piece of written art. Weren’t expecting that, were you? Neither was I.
Well, life is full of plot twists, and here’s one: I just wasted some 15–20 odd minutes writing this when I should be sleeping, and you just wasted 5–8 minutes, give or take, reading it. Congratulations.
You aren’t getting those minutes back, you know?
If you loved what you read, a clap and a response go a long way in helping me produce more written works. Didn’t like something or maybe you have an opinion you’d like to voice? Well, dish it out; I’d love to engage with you in the comments.
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